After a private meeting with Fidel Castro yesterday, the Pontiff told onlookers, including Fidel’s brother Raul who replaced him as president in 2008, that the five-decade-long US embargo should be lifted.

He said Cubans should be able to share in ‘forging a society of wide horizons, renewed and reconciled’.

‘No-one should feel excluded from taking up this exciting search by the limitations of their basic freedoms, or excused from this by indolence or a lack of material resources – a situation which is worsened when restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people,’ Pope Benedict XVI said.

The Pope and Raul Castro at Havana airport (Picture: EPA)

The commercial, economic and financial embargo was imposed on Cuba by the US after the 1959 revolution and significantly strengthened in 1962.

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Earlier the pope told an estimated 500,000 pilgrims in Havana that Cuba had to change.

‘Cuba and the world need change, but this will occur only if each one is in a position to seek the truth and chooses the way of love, sowing reconciliation and fraternity,’ he said in Revolution Plaza.

‘It must be said with joy that in Cuba steps have been taken to enable the church to carry out her essential mission of expressing her faith openly and publicly,’ he said from the altar in the shadow of Cuba’s revolutionary hero Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.